1. Technical Field
This disclosure concerns improving application testing of web service based applications. In particular, this disclosure relates to efficiently identifying test permutations, and initiating execution of unit, integration, regression and performance testing of web services and the methods of web services, in order to rapidly produce high quality web service based applications.
2. Background Information
Organizations continually face the challenges of developing new applications and enhancing existing applications in order to remain competitive. Accurate and thorough testing is a critical factor to producing high quality applications. The difficultly and effort of conducting proper application testing is highly dependent upon the number and complexity of the applications and the business processes the applications are designed to model.
Many of the applications in operation and being developed today are web services based applications deployed in open architectures such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Although web services provide developers the flexibility to rapidly model and deploy complex business processes, development tools currently available to properly test web services and underlying methods of web services provide limited capabilities. A complex web service may enlist any number of web service methods to carryout the business processes modelled by the web service. A tester may need to develop countless test cases in order to properly exercise all the possible operational permutations that the web service methods of a web service may be designed to handle.
Successful unit testing of a web service method and/or web service provides little indication as to the quality and operational integrity of the web service method and web service once deployed into production. Moreover, the quality of integration testing may only be as good as the underlying unit tests performed. The inadequacy of certain integration tests may not even be recognized as such by currently available testing tools. The vast number of test cases that must be identified and/or developed to ensure the quality and operational integrity of web service methods and web services impose significant time commitments on developers and testers. Testers often waste valuable development time reusing outdated tests and developing duplicate tests without realizing such flawed approaches.